A Son Of The Circus (3 page)

And in keeping with the enthusiasm characteristic of converts to Christianity — the doctor was a confirmed Anglican who was both suspicious and in awe of Catholics – Dr Daruwalla was also exhilarated by the Christmas season, which in Bombay isn’t as garishly festooned with commercial enterprise as it has become in Christian countries. This particular Christmas was cautiously joyous for the doctor; he’d attended a Catholic Mass on Christmas Eve
and
an Anglican service on Christmas Day. He was a holiday churchgoer, if hardly a regular one; yet his double churchgoing was an inexplicable overdose – Farrokh’s wife was worried about him.

The doctor’s wife was Viennese, the former Julia Zilk – no relation to the city mayor of that name. The former
Fraulein Zilk
came from an aristocratic and imperious family of Roman Catholics. During the Daruwalla family’s short, infrequent visits to Bombay, the Daruwalla children had attended Jesuit schools; however, this wasn’t because the children were brought up as Catholics – it was only the result of Farrokh maintaining ‘family connections’ with these schools, which were otherwise difficult to get into. The Daruwalla children were confirmed Anglicans; they’d received Anglican schooling in Toronto.

But despite Farrokh’s preference for a Protestant faith, he’d been pleased to entertain his few Jesuit acquaintances on Boxing Day; they were much livelier conversationalists than the Anglicans he knew in Bombay. Christmas itself was a glad tiding, surely; it was a season that produced in the doctor an effusion of goodwill. In the spirit of Christmas, Farrokh could almost forget that the effects of his 20-year-old conversion to Christianity were weakening.

And Dr Daruwalla didn’t give a second thought to the vulture high above the golf course at the Duckworth Club. The only cloud on the doctor’s horizon was how to tell Inspector Dhar the upsetting news. These were not glad tidings for Dhar. But until this unforeseen bad news, it hadn’t been that bad a week.

It was the week between Christmas and New Year’s. The weather in Bombay was uncommonly cool and dry. The active membership of the Duckworth Sports Club had reached 6,000; considering that there was a 22-year waiting list for new members, this number had been rather gradually achieved. That morning, there was a meeting of the Membership Committee, of which the distinguished Dr Daruwalla was guest chairman, to determine whether member number 6,000 should receive any special notification of his extraordinary status. The suggestions ranged from a plaque in the snooker room (where there were sizable gaps among the trophies), to a small reception in the Ladies’ Garden (where the usual bloom of the bougainvillea was diminished by an undiagnosed blight), to a simple typewritten memo thumbtacked alongside the list of Temporarily Elected Members.

Farrokh had often objected to the title of this list, which was posted in a locked glass case in the foyer of the Duckworth Club. He complained that ‘temporarily elected’ meant merely nominated — they weren’t elected at all — but this term had been the accepted usage since the club had been founded 130 years ago. A spider crouched beside the short column of names; it had crouched there for so long, it was presumed dead – or perhaps the spider was also seeking permanent membership. This was Dr Daruwalla’s joke, but the joke was old; it was rumored to have been repeated by all 6,000 members.

It was midmorning, and the committeemen were drinking Thums Up cola and Gold Spot orange soda in the card room when Dr Daruwalla suggested that the matter be dropped.

‘Stopped?’ said Mr Dua, who was deaf in one ear from a tennis injury, never to be forgotten; his doubles partner had double-faulted and flung his racquet. Since he was only ‘temporarily elected’ at the time, this shocking display of bad temper had put an end to the partner’s quest for permanent membership.

‘I move,’ Dr Daruwalla now shouted, ‘that member number six thousand
not
be notified!’ The motion was quickly seconded and passed; not even so much as a typewritten memo would announce the event. Dr Sorabjee, Farrokh’s colleague at the Hospital for Crippled Children, said facetiously that the decision was among the wisest ever made by the Membership Committee. In truth, Dr Daruwalla thought, no one wanted to risk disturbing the spider.

In the card room, the committeemen sat in silence, satisfied with the conclusion of their business; the ceiling fans only slightly ruffled the trim decks of cards that stood perfectly in place at the appropriate tables, which were topped with tightly stretched green felt. A waiter, removing an empty Thums Up bottle from the table where the committeemen sat, paused to straighten one errant deck of cards before leaving the room, although only the top two cards of the deck had been edged out of alignment by the nearest ceiling fan.

That was when Mr Bannerjee walked into the card room, looking for his golfing opponent, Mr Lai. Old Mr Lai was late for their regular nine holes, and Mr Bannerjee told the committee the amusing results of their competition together the day before. Mr Lai had lost a one-stroke lead in a spectacular blunder on the ninth hole: he’d chipped a shot entirely over the green and into a profusion of the blighted bougainvillea, where he’d hacked away in misery and in vain.

Rather than return to the clubhouse, Mr Lai had shaken Mr Bannerjee’s hand and marched in a fury to the bougainvillea; there Mr Bannerjee had left him. Mr Lai was intent on practicing how to escape from this trap should he ever blunder into it again. Petals were flying when Mr Bannerjee parted from his friend; that evening, the gardener (the head mali, no less) was dismayed to observe the damage to the vines and to the flowers. But old Mr Lai was among the more venerable of the Duckworth’s members – if he insisted on learning how to escape the bougainvillea, no one would be so bold as to prevent him. And now Mr Lai was late. Dr Daruwalla suggested to Mr Bannerjee that quite possibly his opponent was still practicing, and that he should search for him in the ruined bougainvillea.

Thus the committee meeting disbanded in characteristic and desultory laughter. Mr Bannerjee went seeking Mr Lai in the men’s dressing room; Dr Sorabjee went off to the hospital for office calls; Mr Dua, whose deafness somehow suited his retirement from the percussiveness of the tire business, wandered into the snooker room to have a crack at some innocent balls, which he would barely hear. Others stayed where they were, turning to the ready decks of cards, or else they found comfort in the cool leather chairs in the reading room, where they ordered Kingfisher lagers or London Diet beers. It was getting on toward late morning, but it was generally thought to be too early for gin and tonics or adding a shot of rum to the Thums Up colas.

In the men’s dressing room and the clubhouse bar, the younger members and actual athletes were returning from their sets of tennis or their badminton or their squash. For the most part, they were tea drinkers at this time of the morning. Those returning from the golf course heartily complained about the mess of flower petals that by now had drifted over the ninth green. (These golfers wrongly assumed that the bougainvillea blight had taken a new and nasty turn.) Mr Bannerjee told his story several more times; each time, the efforts of Mr Lai to defeat the bougainvillea were described in more reckless and damaging terms. A generous good humor pervaded the clubhouse and the dressing room. Mr Bannerjee didn’t seem to mind that it was now too late in the morning to play golf.

The unexpected cool weather could not change the habits of the Duckworthians; they were used to playing their golf and tennis before 11:00 in the morning or after 4:00 in the afternoon. During the midday hours, the members drank or lunched or simply sat under the ceiling fans or in the deep shade of the Ladies’ Garden, which was never exclusively used by (or especially full of) ladies – not nowadays. Yet the garden’s name was unchanged from purdah times, when the seclusion of women from the sight of men or strangers was practiced by some Muslims and Hindus. Farrokh found this odd, for the founding members of the Duckworth Sports Club were the British, who were still welcome there and even comprised a small proportion of the membership. To Dr Daruwalla’s knowledge, the British had never practiced purdah. The Duckworth’s founders had intended the club for any and all citizens of Bombay, provided that they’d distinguished themself in community leadership. As Farrokh and the other members of the Membership Committee would attest, the definition of ‘community leadership’ could be argued for the length of the monsoon, and beyond.

By tradition, the chairman of the Duckworth Club was the governor of Maharashtra; yet Lord Duckworth himself, for whom the club was named, had never been governor. Lord D. (as he was called) had long sought the office, but the eccentricities of his wife were too notorious. Lady Duckworth was afflicted with exhibitionism in general – and with the astonishing wild habit of exposing her breasts in particular. Although this affliction endeared both Lord
and
Lady Duckworth to many members of the club, it was a gesture thought lacking in gubernatorial merit.

Dr Daruwalla stood in the penetrating cool of the empty dance hall, viewing – as he often did – the splendid and abundant trophies and the spellbinding old photographs of Members Past. Farrokh enjoyed such controlled sightings of his father, and of his grandfather, and of the countless avuncular gentlemen among his father’s and grandfather’s friends. He imagined that he could remember every man who’d ever laid a hand on his shoulder or touched the top of his head. Dr Daruwalla’s familiarity with these photographs belied the fact that the doctor himself had spent very few of his 59 years in India. When he was visiting Bombay, Dr Daruwalla was sensitive to anyone or anything that reminded him of how little he knew or understood the country of his birthplace. The more time he spent in the haven of the Duckworth Club, the more the doctor could sustain the illusion that he was comfortable being in India.

At home, in Toronto, where he’d spent most of his adult life, the doctor enjoyed the reputation — especially among Indians who’d never been to India, or who’d never gone back – of being a genuine ‘old India hand’; he was even considered quite brave. After all, it was every few years that Farrokh returned to his native land under what were presumed to be primitive conditions – practicing medicine in a country of such claustrophobic overpopulation. And where were the amenities that could live up to a Canadian standard of comfort?

Weren’t there water shortages and bread strikes, and the rationing of oil or rice, not to mention food adulteration and those gas cylinders that always ran out of gas in the midst of a dinner party? And one often heard about the shoddy construction of buildings, the falling plaster and so on. But only rarely did Dr Daruwalla return to India during the monsoon months, which were the most ‘primitive’ in Bombay. Furthermore, to his fellow Torontonians, Farrokh tended to downplay the fact that he never stayed in India for long.

In Toronto, the doctor spoke of his childhood (as a Bombayite) as if it had been both more colorful and more authentically Indian than it truly had been. Educated by the Jesuits, Dr Daruwalla had attended St Ignatius School in Mazagaon; for recreation, he’d enjoyed the privileges of organized sports and dances at the Duckworth Club. When he reached university age, he was sent to Austria; even his eight years in Vienna, where he completed medical school, were tame and controlled – he’d lived the whole time with his elder brother.

But in the Duckworth’s dance hall, in the sacred presence of those portraits of Members Past, Dr Daruwalla could momentarily imagine that he truly came from somewhere, and that he belonged somewhere. Increasingly, as he approached 60, the doctor acknowledged (only to himself) that in Toronto he often
acted
far more Indian than he was; he could instantly acquire a Hindi accent, or drop it, depending on the company he kept. Only a fellow Parsi would know that English had been his veritable mother tongue, and that the doctor would have learned his Hindi in school. During Farrokh’s visits to India, he was similarly ashamed of himself for how completely European or North American he pretended to be. In Bombay, his Hindi accent disappeared; one had only to hear the doctor’s English to be convinced that he’d been totally assimilated in Canada. In truth, it was only when he was surrounded by the old photographs in the dance hall of the Duckworth Club that Dr Daruwalla felt at home.

Of Lady Duckworth, Dr Daruwalla had only heard her story. In each of her stunning photographs, her breasts were properly if not modestly covered. Yes, a highly elevated and sizable bosom could be detected in her pictures, even when Lady Duckworth was well advanced in years; and yes, her habit of exposing herself supposedly increased as she grew older – her breasts were reported to be well formed (and well worth revealing) into her seventies.

She’d been 75 when she revealed herself in the club’s circular driveway to a horde of young people arriving for the Sons and Daughters of Members’ Ball. This incident resulted in a multivehicle collision that was reputed to bear responsibility for the enlargement of the speed bumps, which were implanted the entire length of the access road. In Farrokh’s opinion, the Duckworth Club was permanently fixed at the speed indicated by those signs posted at both ends of the drive:
DEAD
SLOW
. But this, for the most part, contented him; the admonition to go dead slow didn’t strike Dr Daruwalla as an imposition, although the doctor did regret not being alive for at least one glimpse of Lady Duckworth’s long-ago breasts. The club couldn’t have been dead slow in her day.

As he had sighed aloud in the empty dance hall perhaps a hundred times. Dr Daruwalla sighed again and softly said to himself, ‘Those were the good old days.’ But it was only a joke; he didn’t really mean it. Those ‘good old days’ were as unknowable to him as Canada – his cold, adopted country – or as the India he only pretended to be comfortable in. Furthermore, Farrokh never spoke or sighed loudly enough to be heard by anyone else.

In the vast cool hall, he listened: he could hear the waiters and the busboys in the dining room, setting the tables for lunch; he could hear the clicks and thumps of the snooker balls and the flat, authoritative snap of a card turned faceup on a table. And although it was now past 11:00, two die-hards were still playing tennis; by the soft, slowly paced pops of the ball, Dr Daruwalla concluded that it wasn’t a very spirited match.